The Iron Grail (17 page)

‘There! Half each. Take whichever half you want.’

‘The left side,’ Munda said quickly. ‘The dark of the moon side.’

Kymon picked up the left side of the precious object and passed it to the girl.

‘I like this gift better than the first,’ he said. ‘I’ll pin my half on to my shield. Its brightness will confuse my enemy. What about you, sister?’

‘I’ll dream about it before I do anything with it,’ the girl said with quiet confidence.

Urtha watched them with pride. He said one thing more, before moving on to other matters. ‘After I’m gone, remember: the two halves belong together. They may be separated now, but no matter what happens, they must be joined together before you place my cold flesh in the final hill.’

‘I will build that tomb right here, where we sit!’ Kymon announced, to his father’s amusement. ‘But not for years yet, I hope.’

‘I hope so too.’

*   *   *

The celebration and reunion lasted late into the night, more sober than might have been expected, because of the lack of either wine or the sweetened, strong drink that kings and their retinues favoured, but no less riotous for all that. Around the bright fire, among the tombs of their ancestors, the misery and mystery of the second wasteland was briefly put aside.

Tomorrow, preparations would be made to mark the funeral of Urtha’s queen, Aylamunda. With her body having been dragged away during the sacking of Taurovinda, carrion-lost and rotten in the forest, there would be long and detailed discussion concerning the manner in which she might be suitably honoured.

The sound of a girl’s singing drew me from shallow sleep the following dawn. It was Munda, of course. She had not been to sleep at all. She had spent the night sitting in the tight curve of the river, holding the fragment of her father’s lunula, catching moon and starlight and whispering to herself. Now she was singing about swans.

A light mist hung in the trees and over the river, which flowed almost silently past. Munda looked up at my approach, though she kept singing in that thin, reedy voice. As I stooped to splash water in my face, she stopped the song, watching me.

‘The swans are coming. Can you hear them, Merlin? They’re coming along the river from the sea. Can you hear them?’

‘Not yet. Can you?’

‘A strange wing beat,’ she said, and looked away to the east.

The birds emerged from the mist, twenty or thirty of them, flying low and silently but for the rhythmic sighing of air, the wings rising and falling as if in a slow dream as they passed up the river and over our heads, the long necks craning down as they peered at us before they disappeared.

One came back, black feathers cresting the white wings, eyes golden bright; it beat past me just above the water, then rose, picked up speed and flew back towards the east.

‘She was watching you,’ Munda said, her voice slightly hoarse, perhaps because she was tired, perhaps because she was surprised. Her innocent face was bright with that sudden understanding as she stared up at me.

I had been noticed. I had been found.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Morndun

The return of the king had been celebrated. Now Urtha began the ritual mourning for his lost wife, Aylamunda. He used powdered chalk to whiten his beard, face and arms and began the ritual of the Three Noble Strains: a day to lament her in song; a day to celebrate her memory with song and laughter; and a day to call for a guide from the Otherworld, to find her spirit and take it safely and asleep to the appropriate realm of Shadow Hero Land.

Ullanna understood very clearly that it would be wrong for her—Urtha’s new love—to remain in this sanctuary of the ancestors at this time, and she took provisions and a strong, grey pony and, accompanied by the Cymbrii in their speedy, flashy chariot, crossed the river to the north, and went to find stray cattle and pigs. Kymon and Munda wore the white of lament with their father, and spent the day among the round stones and cairns of the evergroves, walking the track from the river that wound through the groves three times before passing on, unseen for the moment, across the Plain of MaegCatha to the Bull Gate of Taurovinda.

They were joined for this tearful time by one of the High Women, Rianata, and the old priest, the Speaker for the Past, in his cloak of white bull’s hide and his collar of blue and white feathers.

Urtha asked if I would like to join them, but the skin-and-feather man looked disapproving. I seemed to have known his type all my life. A man of prodigious memory, deep insight and complex thinking, and a vigorous defender of tradition, he would have a small ability to see through the veil of Time, but darkly. Even Niiv would have been more perspicacious. These rough priests had been born with little, and achieved their dream-sight by dedication and training rather than innate ability.

Still, in this rough land their crude methods would probably be sufficient to arouse the sleeping spirits, and make them ready to accept another among them. I decided to keep my distance, though Urtha urged me not to stray too far.

Aylamunda was lost, not just her body—dragged away during the sacking of the fort—but her ghost. She was wandering. And such wandering, to the Celts, was a terrible thing. She would have to be called back, and deciding the means to do this would involve a great deal of discussion.

That discussion dominated the second day, though not before broken-breasted Ambaros had stood, holding strongly on to a spear, and delivered a fond testimonial to his daughter. His legs would barely support him; his face was drawn and ashen, the flesh shrinking on his skull. I watched him with sympathy. I realised, now, that he was keeping himself alive for the moment of his daughter’s funeral. No event that might come later mattered so much as the ending of her wandering.

Cathabach, the once-priest, found me later by the river’s edge. Perhaps he had come at Urtha’s behest, perhaps on his own initiative, I don’t know. His hair was tied in an elaborate topknot and he had marked his face and arms with protective blue symbols.

‘Could you fly and find her?’ he asked me bluntly. ‘It’s a big request; it may be beyond your ability. This is the sort of death that we find very difficult to honour properly. Aylamunda may be watching us from that glade over there, or she may be halfway round the world below, confused and frightened. Bringing her home will not be easy. Not for this small tribe.’

He looked at me carefully. He had nothing to hide and he knew it.

‘Tomorrow, we must call for her guide. Knowing where in the darkness she is wandering would help greatly.’

‘What a wilderness this is,’ I commented, and the warrior laughed, understanding exactly what I meant: that everyone was lost!

‘My own feeling,’ he said after a moment, ‘is that she is following Tauraun, the white bull with the red ears and the eyes of Taranis the Thunderer marked in brown on its flanks. The Donn. The Roaring Bull, whose stamping of the earth threw up the great fortress itself. But that’s just a feeling. I’m still in taboo when it comes to knowing.’

Now I understood the sound of bull-roaring I had heard when I had first returned to the deserted stronghold. The ancient spirit of the hill was awakening in response to the changes in its occupation. There was a great deal of Time locked away below the orchard groves and ramshackle houses inside the ruined enclosure.

I told Cathabach that it would be pointless flying as a hawk, running as a hound, or swimming as the salmon in search of Aylamunda. I would have to travel in the ghostly form of Morndun. The action was difficult to do and costly to an enchanter’s health. This enchanter, at least. I had used the ghost in Greek Land, not long ago, and the deep scars of that journey still ached.

Cathabach said he understood. ‘Ten masks with ten charms,’ he said, referring to my talents in enchantment. ‘Is that right?’

‘Yes. I make no secret of it.’

‘Ghosts and creatures, and the moon, and Sorrow, and Memory, and there is one for the child in the land, and one to see the shadows of forgotten forests. Is that right?’

‘Yes. All of them.’

‘Memory would interest me; and to see forgotten forests, that too. We must talk about this another time.’ He tugged his rough beard as he looked at me, curious about the masks, curious about my origins. ‘Are there no other masks through which you might see the dead queen?’

Moondream, I thought to myself. Perhaps Moondream, the facility to see the woman in the land. But I had never used it to look for a ghost, merely to summon and invoke the feminine presence in the earth.

‘It will have to be Morndun,’ I told Cathabach. ‘I’m willing to try. But I’ll have to wait until night. And I’ll need help.’

‘To make the mask?’

‘The mask is in the mind. It’s a long time since I carved tree bark for my living. I need someone to watch me.’

He touched a finger to his brow, a gesture of thanks. ‘If you need company, I’ll be glad to join you. Within a year I’ll cast off the
geis
and start training in dreamwalking again.’

I told him that I welcomed his offer. I added that he would learn nothing from what might occur, since he would see nothing but my motionless body. But there was a certain comfort in knowing that my undefended carcass, its mind absent, would be under the constant surveillance of a friend.

*   *   *

We were hailed by the watch at the gate. It was late afternoon and the light was going, the sky a rolling swirl of storm clouds, the wind becoming fierce. Urtha remained inside, but Manandoun and several others picked up their spears and ran quickly to the palisade.

The grass of the plain rippled in the wind. The high ramparts of the fortress were dark, the streaming banners of the invader like threshing snakes on their poles, brightly coloured, designed like hideous grinning animals. Two men walked towards us, one of them bent under the weight of a pack, the other striding ahead, tall staff in hand. I could see the flash of his eyes. Both strangers seemed grey: grizzle-bearded, grey-haired, grey-cloaked.

Then I recognised them as the Wolf-heads who had earlier passed through the valley of the exiles.

Twenty paces from the gate they dropped to their haunches, watching us nervously, and asked for food and shelter. Manandoun shrugged, allowed them to enter. They came into the camp, looking around, and made for the nearest fire.

When the moon was high, adding an edge of silver to the clouds above us, I walked downriver with Cathabach, to the end of the evergroves, and took a small boat across the water. On the other side of Nantosuelta, beyond the landing, was a broad area of silent marsh, crowded with thickets of willow, alder and hornbeam, and mossy banks enclosing reed-fringed pools, some of them deep, some shallow, all dangerous.

This was the Pressing Down place, the place of sacred execution, and Cathabach was reluctant to enter it, though he had done so once in his life, to participate in the ceremonial despatch of a young prince, an abandoned hostage from the Videlici who gave his life in exchange for the fertile marriage of a noble couple within Urtha’s clan.

A raised walkway led out into the thickets, above the saturated and reedy earth. There were platforms hidden in the gloom, each with its votive idol, each above a wet pool, where the final rites had been practised before the gruesome slaughter of the chosen victim. The marshes were still screaming with those who had been staked out, face down, pinned into the mud and slowly drowned, some for the return of the sun, some to pacify the howling spirits of encroaching winter; some because they had broken one of their
geisa
, their birth taboos.

‘Why here?’ Cathabach whispered uncomfortably, rubbing his fingers over one of the images on his right forearm.

‘A need for the dead,’ I said. ‘I need a vehicle.’

‘You’ll have your choice of those. But these aren’t ordinary dead, Merlin. They no longer belong to us.’

He watched me, wondering if I knew to what he referred: that the corpses in the marsh were the property of gods, the earth, or the night-stalking warlord Araun, who gathered the spirits of those who had betrayed their own lives. These were mostly adulterers, matricides, hostages from other clans who had been deserted and men who had shirked battle-combat.

‘Besides all that,’ he added, ‘this place has been used from before our clan ever came here. There are some very old corpses in those pools.’

‘I’m just going to…’ how could I put it to the anxious man? ‘
borrow
one. For a while. I’ll take the consequences.

‘You certainly will,’ the once-druid said emphatically. ‘I resign my charge of watching over you against anything other than a worldly man with an iron sword.’

‘I ask for no more,’ I reassured the wan-faced warrior-priest.

The raised wooden walkway on which we crouched was as corrupt as the battlements of the hill fort, battered by winter, weakened by rain, half sinking into the mire. I walked out along it with the greatest care. It branched twice, running into the willow groves, but I kept always to the left. Behind me, Cathabach had lit a torch. Its small flickering glow was comforting in this stinking, silent darkness.

The platform I finally reached had also been ravaged by the winds, but there was enough planking left to sit upon. Around me, in the darkness, creatures moved and scurried, splashed and chattered. They had come to think of this killing ground as their own again. The tarred and leathered coracles were all half submerged, the homes of eels and rats. The willows loomed eerily in the slender light, drooping giants, the fronds of their branches gathering in the bones of three thousand years of water sacrifice.

I have written elsewhere about the painful and frightening process by which Morndun is called, and the dead can be addressed and used as guides. The last time I had resorted to this particularly unpleasant form of travel had been by the Daan river, before the great assault on Delphi, in Greek Land. I was still haunted and hounded in my sleep by the sights and voices I had aroused during that desperate mission.

I felt sick, now, as I summoned the dead.